Open Innovation Portal Support

Whether you host your own Technology Portal, or set up an IdeaConnection Portal, submissions to your portal will be significantly increased by engaging our dedicated outreach personnel.

The Challenge

With almost a million new websites being launched every week and 150,000 new domain names being registered every day, competition for web traffic is fierce. With this degree of competition, launching a new Open Innovation Portal, or trying to improve an existing one, requires a tremendous marketing effort before it is discovered by the target audience.

Once targets have been reached, it is essential to continue to promote your portal to these relevant groups, to remind them of why to use it, and to continually increase your user base and effectiveness of the portal.

Many open innovation portals have failed to achieve reasonable traction, even when substantial resources have been applied. This is often due to one or more reasons:

a lack of understanding of what is required to create a successful web platform, and then a subsequent misallocation of support resources (e.g. most of the resources go to initial marketing push);

a lack of understanding and attention to the needs of users versus your own needs. This is demonstrated by the widespread dissatisfaction with OI portals by people who have submitted, only to never hear back;

the assumption that scientific people and academics will immediately embrace a web platform, completely replacing a dynamic that has traditionally been quite relationship-driven.

Rather than take a likely-to-fail strategy of "build it and they will come," IdeaConnection has adopted continual initiative that will help protect your investment in your portal and serve as a tool to maintain communication with important IP holders and developers, people who are becoming an increasingly important source of technologies for commercialization.

An increasing number of companies are finding that their open innovation portals are not meeting expectations. There are many thousands of technology requests on the internet and very few ever get filled. IdeaConnection's Open Innovation Portal Support services have proven to be very effective in increasing quality submissions by 300% to 3,000%.

The Solution

Outreach

Our team actively engages with relevant universities, associations and other agencies in order to steer the owners of new technologies to submit to your portal. IdeaConnection's personnel are science and technology literate, and are dedicated exclusively to outreach on your behalf.

The mandate for the outreach personnel is to communicate and reach out to targets in order to:

Technology Screening

If you accept ideas from the public, you may be interested in providing yourself with a layer of protection against IP contamination.

Companies are often sued by people who claim that their ideas/inventions have been stolen by a company that they had submitted them to.

By directing these ideas through the IdeaConnection system, you achieve two benefits:

Reduce Your Burden
IdeaConnection's experts will filter all of the ideas that are submitted to you. Our experts have signed Confidentiality and Non-Disclosure Agreements, and have relevant knowledge and experience pertinent to your submissions. These experts will evaluate the submissions and forward to you only quality ideas/inventions that pertain to your area of interest, thereby reducing the quantity of submissions you need to review. This saves you money by reducing the workload impact on internal resources.

Protect Yourself
IdeaConnection will ensure that you only are given non-confidential information up to the time you decide to sign a non-disclosure agreement to have in-depth discussions with the submitter. Also, by only being shown a small quantity of high quality ideas, you are being provided with a layer of protection from IP contamination. You have real deniability in reference to most of the ideas submitted to you, and can confidently deflect frivolous lawsuits, as you have never seen (most of) the submitted ideas and inventions.

Traffic Generation

Web traffic comes from 2 sources – organic traffic and paid traffic:

Organic traffic:

Links from your main website

Links from other websites

Returning visitors

Paid traffic:

Pay-per-click ads (PPC)

Banner ads

PR campaigns

Other marketing initiatives

Unless a portal has some viral or self-promoting element to it, there will usually be little organic traffic generated at the outset. Typically, a web marketing strategy will rely on paid ads to build up traffic to the web service, and then rely on a combination of paid/organic traffic on an ongoing basis.

The paid traffic will attract first-time visitors, a percentage of which will turn into repeat users. A marketing strategy will count on some of these visitors leaving links to your service in various places (blogs, their own sites, discussion boards, etc.), which will drive more (organic) traffic and also help with your search engine positioning.

Once a certain traffic threshold is attained, continuing the paid traffic campaign will result in maintenance or continual growth of traffic.

The main consideration with PPC campaigns is that, like any auction, they do need constant (daily) attention. Bid prices change on a day-to-day basis, and the campaign and keywords must be continually tuned to increase spending on high performing keywords and ads and decrease spending on low performing keywords and ads.

IdeaConnection's dedicated team will manage your PPC marketing, to make the most effective use of your marketing budget.

Awards System

Our unique portal solution includes a system that awards people for referring technologies to your portal, thus incentivizing people to use your portal over other venues.

Search Engine Optimization

Our SEO prowess will make your portal search engine friendly, and will move you up the ranks for your search terms. IdeaConnection will manage and implement all current and future available search engine optimization tools.

Text Tuning

We tune your webpage to make sure you have the highest response rate for your desired target submissions. This includes changes to the portal, text or content with the goal of increasing search engine traffic to the portal.

IdeaConnection's ability to easily expand initiatives, based on success;

Our established and trusted working relationship with a track record of being responsive and attentive;

IdeaConnection is flexible and resourceful, and able to modify the strategies used, based on real-time results.

Measurable Results

(Client name confidential)

"In a 30 month period, there have been a total of 499 submissions to our OI portal. Out of these 499 submissions, the number of submissions directly resulting from IdeaConnection outreach activities is at least 380. In other words, at least 78% of the submissions to the portal were a direct result of IdeaConnection outreach activities. During our outreach activities, we often spoke with department heads or other administrators who promise to disseminate the information throughout their organizations, and it would have been impossible for us to have tracked the results of that dissemination. Therefore, it is likely many submissions were made because of IdeaConnection efforts, but were untracked in our statistics, so the 78% figure is likely under-reported.
It should also be mentioned that the above figures do not include the submissions generated as a direct result of search engine marketing, such as pay-per-click ad purchases."